I have a compulsion about books. So far, I have filled a small house and a large office and a car boot and it’s starting to make me think that bibliophilia may be incurable. I collect these items with a hunger, even read the damn things, too, but I am rapidly beginning to assume that the power of the collecting bug may have overtaken the prospect of ever reading all of ‘em.
This is a quite a long term illness. I remember as a teenager, starting to mop up science fiction, then American cultists, and then realising quite rapidly that half an hour spent in a charity shop or two could actually produce a few cut-price gems, slightly dog-eared but utterly serviceable for little more than pennies.
I recall vividly, to this day, a second-hand store on my grandma’s Moss Side high street delivering a second edition of the Beat/Angry Young Men classic 1958 anthology Protest for a far from hefty 15p. I was checking something in it last week.
In fact, thinking about it, there was one emporium that truly got me hooked: a shop in my university city of Sheffield called Rare and Racy which became my second, no third, maybe fourth, home, after my basement flat, the Nottingham House pub and the pinball arcade in the students’ union. Rock’n’roll writer-to-be Andy Gill (not the Leeds art student and Gang of Four guitarist, though we were all contemporaries) was one of the kings of the flipper, I do recall, in that long corridor next to the bar.
But Rare and Racy was a place to behold. Novels, poetry, photo collections, quirky postcards, and vinyl records by the several hundred. There was certainly a critic in that city – maybe it was Gill (not A.A.) himself – with a veritable supply of new long players because, every week, there’d be another selection of unspun recordings for my friends and I to plunder. It was the intoxicating height of pub rock and punk, new wave and reggae, and this marvellous shop – still there! – was a great place to spend an hour and a few quid, too.
This was the period when there was scant cash around – grants didn’t go too far even at 20p a pint – but there was the thrill of the chase. If it wasn’t a music fix you were seeking, then there was every chance you’d find a Kerouac or a Wolfe (Tom rather than Thomas) or a Thompson (Hunter S. rather than E.P.) or a Vonnegut lodged near the Donne or the Marvell (Andrew not Comics) off-loaded by the outgoing Lit students. It was a golden age to build your own paperback library and get an extra-curricular education.
Then time moved on and the prospect of scouring musty charity shelves lost its appeal. Yet, eventually, fantastic new bookshops – Waterstone’s, Dillon’s, Borders – came along and, hip to the fact that there was a whole generation of readers who dug that late 20th Century bag, from Burgess to Ballard, Plath to Amis, Salinger to Pynchon, provided clean-lined shelves full of the stuff. And knowledgable assistants. And coffee. Like a Left Bank cafe, only smoke-free and hoovered.
Then and then, Dillon’s was swallowed up. And now Borders has gone belly up, I’m afraid. But, for good or maybe even ill, our new best best best-friend, the worldwide web, has, of course, solved the book collector’s dilemma – and how. It has seen off most of those worthy, offline stalwarts because it’s just simply too freaking good at what it does.
Today, I was trying to track a relatively rare collection of verse and prose by punk bassist and poet Richard Hell. Click Amazon. There’s the title in question. Click Marketplace. There’s the item I want – ‘Used, Good’ – at about half the list price. And there’s the link to a series of further recommendations: all of Hell’s output, it seems, and at smile-inducing, knockdown prices.
When I was 16 or, indeed, 36, I had only a very small sense of what was even out there in print – in the UK, in the USA, around the world. If I’d gone into a good bookshop in 1986 or 1996, neither I, nor they, would have known what the hell Richard Hell had published. Now, the net gives me instant, comprehensive information and all at prices that are a fraction of what I would have paid in Waterstone’s if I’d known the book even existed!!
In other words, the book addict now has a virtual dealer in his own cyber-library and no volume need remain on any shelf – real or imagined – for long. It’s just there. Available. And winging its way in cardboard or brown paper in about three days’ time. I haven’t yet pressed the ‘Order’ button to access Hell and his short oeuvre. But I no doubt will. It’s there in a my hyper-basket. And will, quite probably, be wending a course into my quite literal mailbox very soon. My groaning bookcases will have to accept another gaggle of new arrivals.
Taken from this post:
By the book: Nothing left on shelf in cyber-library
5 Responses to By the book: Nothing left on shelf in cyber-library
[Author's Note: It looks like Barney was allowed to use quote marks and apostrophes in his Feelies response below, without having his copy riddled with a phalanx of back slashes upon publication, so I'm ready to try a comment once again.]
Fine summary of the alterations in the eternal books quest, over the years since it first gripped us in adolescence, Simon. Locating a readily-available, reasonably-priced copy of almost any book that interests me, has become ridiculously easy. In fact, sometimes I miss the random serendipity of my earlier searches, when I would often run across something I didn’t even know I was looking for (e.g., a copy of Tom Carson’s novel Twisted Kicks in a thrift store in Dayton, Ohio, sometime in the ’80s), and then receive a reading experience I might not have had if left to my own predilections. I dunno — both methods have their attractions for me.
But I’d like to get in a plug for Thomas (NOT Tom) Wolfe, while we’re on the topic. Thomas Wolfe, Asheville, North Carolina’s most distinguished son in my estimation, was my very favorite writer around 1964-66, after I discovered him via the assignment of his novel Look Homeward Angel in my freshman English course at college. His overblown, emotionally verbose style wouldn’t seem to match my usual preference for understatement in prose, but nobody else has ever expressed a small-town boy’s intense longing for The City the way Wolfe did for me when I was “young, and drunk, and twenty.” I loved Wolfe then, and renewed my affection a few years later when I discovered that Wolfe was also Jack Kerouac’s favorite writer when HE was in college. Kerouac moved on to his own beuatiful style eventually, yet I think something of Wolfe’s intense expressiveness always stayed within him. In my own maturity (such as it is), I’ve realized that Thomas Wolfe’s literary style — with its speeding passenger trains and gleaming skyscraper canyons — was pure Art Deco, not coincidentally my favorite style of design. Wolfe’s writing career spanned the years 1925 to 1938, exactly when Art Deco was at its peak. Now it all fits together . . .
Ironically, Tom Wolfe, one of the fathers of “new journalism,” has probably figured more prominently in my own writing career as a rock critic(q.v.), but I never quite trusted his terminal superciliousness (in prose & bow ties), and he’s of course long since gone conservative on us. When it comes to my core beliefs, Thomas Wolfe is still the writer I prefer to find in the real & virtual book shops.
Yup, me too. My name is Leyla and I’m an addict. The act of buying books – like buying CDs and, before them, vinyl – is just so pleasurable in itself that it’s easy to get a my eyes are bigger than my stomach type situation. Which, with books, would probably be my eyes are bigger than my eyes.Or my shelves.
I used to be a bit of a self disciplinarian when it came to books, forcing myself to finish what I’d started, but as time goes by and the shelves groan more deeply, I’ve adopted the policy of some of my friends – suck it and see. If I suck it and it sucks after 100 pages, I’ll stop and go on to another book.Some of my friends give up even sooner and I can see why. Life’s too short.
What the net has really opened up for me as well as availability of everything is the ability to access recommendations from other like-minded people. Twenty years ago I would wander round bookshops and buy authors I’d read before or seen mentioned in a paper, or books which just looked interesting. But for the past five years or so I’ve read quite a few books on the basis of the recommendations of people in a book forum whose opinions I respect.
Like harder habits it causes a pale, wan complexion, loss of physical fitness, compulsive behaviour and an empty purse, but I can’t seem to break it…
Richard – As ever, thanks for your thoughts. Dismissing Thomas Wolfe was more to do with journalistic device than serious critique and I appreciate your response. The earlier Wolfe is important, of course – important to you, important to Kerouac, important to me. I think I read two volumes in the great trilogy and his word-paintings that capture the vastness of America, the night, train travel, and so much more made both for invigorating reading but also laid the way for JK to pen his debut novel The Town and the City, of course. Kerouac suffered, didn’t he, because the critics saw it as a Wolfeian pastiche, in essence, and he left that pre-war style behind soon after. The thoughts you share on Deco are very interesting: when I read Wolfe some time ago I was, I’m sure, much less aware of the artistic moment that formed a backdrop to his own literary art. If time allows, I’ll go back and check that – and also try and complete the trilogy! If you want to be reassured of the younger Wolfe’s stature (and all your reflections on the man are fair), then Katie Mills’ The Road Story and the Rebel (her chapter on Kesey, Cassady et al) may convince you that his worth goes beyond the ‘zap’ and the ‘pow’ of his psychedelic period. Mills feels that Wolfe’s florid account on paper goes a long way to compenasting for Kesey’s failure to finish the acid tests movie itself.
Leyla – Join the happy club. Though it can become more stressful on relationships as the years move on! My partner has been known to threaten large sections of my collections (rock magazines, come into play here, too) with physical eviction. She may have a point. Though I feel as if a part of me will be torn out if she fulfills her threat! Bigger house? Rationalisation of the items in the firing line? But I do think without the internet I would have now settled into my fur-lined rut and stopped adding – just enjoyed the books, music, magazines I have…the web’s an insidious delight though….
S
I know that feeling, Simon. Every few weeks I get the ‘why don’t you throw all this junk out?’ argument, with sweeping gestures at the piles of books, vinyl, cassettes and so on. But I love having my hoarded stash, even if I never get round to giving most of it the attention it deserves. I’m one of those Luddites left cold by the idea of e books – why buy have something you can’t hold and store? I’m a fan of libraries because I acknowledge that I just couldn’t buy all the books I want to read, but if I’m going to pay for a book I want it there in its woody splendour on my shelf. Maybe this is the reason I still buy CDs instead of i-tunes. I’m dreading the day when, as happened with videos, they just stop making CDs and paper books.